Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express
thetransitguy.substack.com
thetransitguy.substack.com
We'd go to Dollywood a few times a year - she would give out free tickets to people who worked in Gatlinburg to go. It's really well run, and their water park is great too. Growing up, we'd ride the train when we visited. While I didn't appreciate it much as a kid, when I grew up I realized how awesome of an opportunity that was.. I moved away from Tennessee about 12 years ago, one of the biggest things I have missed is Dollywood and their big steam train.
Words cannot describe the love and admiration myself and the vast majority of Tennesseans have for Dolly Parton. She is the closest thing to a living Saint that many of us will ever witness.
Imagination Library is mostly an umbrella organization that provides logistical support to the many, many locally-funded groups that actually send the books.
She's very kind, and apparently very charming and down-to-earth despite having a deity-quality voice, but she's also really smart and knows how to leverage her celebrity to help people.
If you've never listened to it, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMrfM711vXI - it's "Jolene", one of her most famous songs, but slowed down like it was a 45 RPM single played at 33 1/3 RPM like an LP. Not a single note is off, even that slowly.
A visit to the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg area and the Smoky Mountains is great trip, especially with kids. Lots of quirky nonsense to enjoy, as well as some beautiful nature.
(That is, I should "fix that" by going up to the Smokies with them, not by getting rid of the kids!)
I grew up in metro Atlanta and some of my favorite childhood memories are of family trips to the Smokies.
Mingus mill is one of my favorite places in the world.
I live in Chattanooga now and we take the kids every 6 months or so.
We all had a blast and didn't expect to love it so much. Just a fantastic place and they are doing a great job.
I'm still sad that Cedar Fair sold out to Six Flags, because they had at least a modestly better reputation. Six Flags in my opinion has long been run in a fashion that makes private equity proud: Reduce cap-ex to the minimum level, minimize cleaning, maintenance, staffing, etc. while extracting every last dollar possible for short-term gain.
It's hard not to worry about the Cedar Fair parks under that sort of management having seen it at its worst first hand once already. Kings Island has a big place in my heart and I saw the Six Flags takeover with some grimacing from the viewpoint of a tiny, tiny shareholder in Cedar Fair.
But also yeah, trying to come back from the CapEx problems Kentucky Kingdom was saddled with by Six Flags is a part of where I have a lot of respect for what Herschend has been doing at the park. It's slow, but steady improvement so far, with a CapEx plan that doesn't seem that aggressive, but also takes into account how much was needed and most importantly seems to be planning for the long term again (versus Six Flags' short-term mentality).
I don't now if it's useful, but this way of putting quanties in context, would be neat to see about all kinds of things. Like how they seem to always do rare things compared to your chance of getting hit by lightning.
What's feasible for a theme park doesn't necessarily extrapolate to public transit.
My wife and I once left Gatlinburg after a week there and our tire blew out on the way out of town. It was a Sunday morning. Literally our only option to get it replaced that day was a Walmart location 15 miles away. So we had to wait for AAA for an hour and a half to tell us we were stuck using a donut to get there.
There is a trolley system but it is anemic.
Even if you built train lines everywhere outside urban areas, any stop you step off at would still require a 20 minute drive to get to where you are going. (Or in your case 15!)
Works out to about 288 private airports per state on average, and 100 public per state (on average).
Also, that was 15 miles, not 15 minutes. I think it took us more than an hour to get there with all the traffic. Excellent example of a tourist trap.
A related quirk of the area is its onetime attitude towards free alcohol samples, which I wrote about last year: https://tedium.co/2024/11/10/free-sample-history/
One of the worst places for rail east of the Mississippi.
Nearly all of the low population density states are out West.
Parent should have compared Denmark's population density with TN's (65/km^2).
We had a viable rail network all over the country as recently as the early 1950s. Federal policy blew it up because dispersing the population was seen as a civil defense priority for an atomic war, and cars and airplanes provided an economic engine to keep workers and returning soldiers employed.
Later, the shift to rural industry and trucking was a way to break unions. Meatpacking transformed from a good union gig back to an oppressive industry fueled by undocumented labor. If the workers acted up, the owners would realize they knew where a bunch of undocumented people lived and call in INS/ICE.
Do you have a citation for this?
(I'm not necessarily doubting, it's just a claim I have not heard before).
Also google the “Clay report”, there’s a bunch of books and sources from there.
At this point, (1955) bombers and fission bombs were the threat. That’s why we had AT&T invest in hardened long lines facilities, shelters and duck and cover.
The reality of hydrogen bombs and ICBMs kind of took the wind out of sails of civil defense. You’re not going to drive out of Manhattan with 20 minutes notice and get to a place where you’ll survive. This really affected the people associated with this — the think tank guys at RAND and other places assumed they’d all be dead by the mid 1970s, and I can’t help to think that it didn’t affect their points of view.
Does this mean it is not worthwhile to build public transit in the European part of Denmark? If not, then why does the population density of the entire US matter in a discussion about Tennessee, a state 80% denser than the American average?
By the way, Finland has both a smaller economy and a way lower population density (18.4 per km^2) than Denmark and the US. Would railways be not useful in Finland because of that?
If Denmark population 6 million people and 141 people per/km^2 has zero issue with trains then Florida a flat state population 22 million population density 163/km^2 should be full of them.
And it’s not alone. MD has 6 million people and 246/km^2, Massachusetts 7 million 347/km^2, New Jersey 9.3 million and 488 people / km^2.
Further, if you consider the road network the overwhelming majority of roads are in high populations density areas. NYC alone has ~1/6 as many road miles as the entire interstate highway system which criss cross the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System It’s a classic edge to surface area problem, 10,000 acre farms need 1/100 the roads per acre as 1 acre suburban homes. The same kind of scaling applies to rail networks.
I know some new models don't include spares, but they often have run flats and temp sealant kits included.
What are the other options?
We also would have had a better shot at not having our tire blow out if the closest gas station wasn’t 10 miles away.
For some reason, it's always a Nissan.
Ergo, if you want the cheapest car you can get, it'll probably be a Nissan.
* Before the late-10s Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi insanity
It's wild how that one man managed to change the entire path of a once great brand.
If you have a pulse and a recent paystub, you can get financing from Nissan.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/adulting-101-life-skills...
(Fyi, if anyone reading this does ever use that sealant stuff, when you get to a proper repair shop TELL THEM about the sealant before I pop the bead and spray it all over the shop.)
Turns an "omg" problem into "eh, hold my beer..." for 99% of tire punctures.
I would describe that as "inconvenient" but actually very fortunate!
Walmart was only 15 miles away? You have a donut/spare, or AAA has provided you with one? That's lucky! Nowhere near "problem" territory at all.
Just an interruption to your schedule, but that happens on road trips.
Part of Tennessee's charm is how far you can get with a smile and "Gosh, I hate to bother you, but could you..."
My husband and I were driving a camouflaged CUCV (military bronco) from VA to WV around Thanksgiving. Towing a trailer full of stuff and had four large dogs.
The truck died. In Virginia, one mile from the WV line. Someone picked me up and dropped me off at the first gas station so I could call AAA. I had to talk with several CSRs; the last one told me the closest tow truck was in Charlottesville, hours away from where we were on I64. I was beet red, smoking like a chimney, and making up curse words.
Once we kinda agreed that there was likely a closer alternative, the young woman asked how the tow truck driver would identify the truck since it was camo. I told the men, they chuckled, and I told her it was CAMO, it was not covered by a cloaking device. I hung up.
The young man at the gas station/coffee shop called a local tow truck and we were dropped at Gate 3 of fair grounds in Fairlee, WV.
Ended up that the camo/cloaking device paled in comparison to the later challenge: It was the first day of hunting season and most garages were closed during the week of Thanksgiving.
I hate AAA.
We live in Sevier County, and Dolly offers $5 tickets to her park to locals this week, which is really quite a charitable thing to do. The discount even applies for taking ~$100 off of a season pass.
Never realized that train got so much usage, but I guess it makes sense. Although you do have to pay attention if you sit near the front as you’ll be slightly covered in soot after the ride.
Trump is a reaction to large portions of the population being actively screwed over by decades of neoliberal policy that the Democrats are still trying to ram down their throats, and "anything other than more of that" is what is winning in most swing states. It's unfortunate the the Republican party is incapable of running someone who isn't a infantile, thin-skinned, nasty blowhard to govern responsibly while in power, but here we are, and we'll unfortunately stay here until either the Republican party grows a spine, the Democratic party figures out how to not intentionally alienate a good portion of the voting population while also preventing their base from destroying the party from within, or the whole thing blows up.
All that would change the moment she decided to run (or maybe she could delay it until she got elected). The reason she maintains her popularity is that she generally stays out of politically divisive issues and that the media doesn't demonize her if she does dabble into one.
I'm sure some people did think that. But in my experience, many more people thought they were horrible candidates that showed the Democrat party cared more about rewarding insiders than actually winning the election.
In addition to the longer scenic trips, there is regular 6 mile round trip “Missionary Ridge Local” route that could theoretically be used for commuting.
I think my favorite part is when the announcer explains the emergency stop system, and clarifies that getting a cinder in your face doesn't count as an emergency (IIRC they have safety goggles you can wear if you're concerned about it).
EDIT: found a video I took of it going by where you can hear the whistle blow (I was there over the holidays which is why it's decked out for Christmas): https://www.instagram.com/p/B64mteDJUBl/
That said, Big Boy 4014 is traveling between Cheyenne and Denver next month (https://www.up.com/heritage/steam/schedule/index.htm)
There was a joke that made its rounds here round about the time Queen Elizabeth died:
> Bob: "The queen's dead"
> Alice: "Dolly?!"
If you ride the train, be prepared for soot to get in your eyes.
I'm sure Dolly would be tickled silly to know a bunch of computer people were talking about her.
He has a little festival every year on his property:
As an East Tennessee native, I love everything Dolly Parton!
You're looking for "Life is as peaceful as a baby's sigh":
https://genius.com/Dolly-parton-my-tennessee-mountain-home-l...
https://www.madhousemagazine.com/elton-john-confirms-tiny-da...
In other words, the Dollywood Express would be a lot less fun if it spent half the day waiting while trolls unload corndogs from two-person handcars randomly distributed along the track.
[0] https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance#:~:text=For%20ove...
They got out of that business because it was losing ridership and money.
The scam was in from the beginning. The car helped exacerbate the problem and the train companies made big fusses about all the lost ridership to the car, as things went along, but even at the beginning a lot of the US rail companies were built on the knowledge that cargo was lucrative and passenger travel the necessary trojan horse to pickup land for cheap.
Flip-side, I have heard that the phase-out RMS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mail_Service ) cut the RR's passenger train revenue by about 1/3. Few business models can survive a 1/3 revenue cut.
BTW - at the high end, airplanes were at least as damaging (to passenger rail) as cars.
I was talking most specifically about the early "oil rush" ones in a lot of "rollover country" (or yes, "flyover country" being the modern term because indeed, air travel also disrupted train travel a lot) that didn't live long enough to be long-established, in the North-East, or bother much at all with opulent terminals and luxury cars. Many of those companies really did exist just long enough for eminent domain to do its job and launder public lands into private hands that cared a lot more about cargo contracts than any of the places the trains stopped along the way.
Most of those rail company names are also kind of lost to time, too, and the tracks are owned by cargo-oriented mega-conglomerates like CSX today. Not to pick on any one in particular by naming names, but also the easiest one to anecdotally name because it owns the dilapidated station I regularly walk past that is today an awful, unsafe shelter for the unhoused that sometimes cargo trains sit on top of for hours at a time, and wasn't particularly "opulent" (outdoor and entirely exposed to the elements) even during the exactly 10 years it operated as a passenger station. (It closed to passenger travel before both most highways had been built and air travel became common, weird huh? Surely just a coincidence that 10 years was the required passenger contract by the eminent domain seizures that opened the land for rail development?)
We got in 4 hours late if I recall and nearly all of that was waiting for freight trains.
I'm not sure who is right in the above, but it is important to at least consider all sides of the argument.
Amtrak seems to stuck on large projects, so we have shelf's full of plans/studies on new lines, but they are all too big to build and still they keep making more.
Even where they don't own tracks, doing a deep dive into the areas where there are problems can find solutions. There are many options to force a private owner to fix problems, and congress can fund part of the cost for a passing track if Amtrak calls it a priority. Or Amtrak and sue the private railroad for not giving them legal priority if that is the real problem. I'm sure there are lots of other options that someone in the railroads would know.
With nationalized rails, the US could set standards for rail-sharing which could help passenger rail and invest in improved rail connections between cities which would improve both freight and passenger rail service.
Currently, each railroad company gets to maintain their own little fiefdoms in certain parts of the US
https://public.railinc.com/about-railinc/blog/who-owns-railr...
My mother has some mobility issues and the park was pretty well laid out for her to get around with an electric scooter. The park has lots of rides for different ages of children. And the surrounding Pigeon Forge area has lots of other attractions to make a jam-packed week of activities.
The city it's in is also right next door to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, so it's very easy to make a day trip for various trails or tours.
Reducing public transit to an unserious/unreal thing is the point.
People who live in car-bound places (most of America) visit theme parks like Disney's where a big part of the novelty is the make-believe urban walkability and transit (i.e. Disney's "Main Street"), creating the belief that such things are fantasy (tied to the rest of Disney's make-believe world) rather that something quite normal that people in much of the urban world experience (minus the dancing anthropomorphic mice).
Essentially, what is pretty normal elsewhere is repackaged as fantasy in the US.
Are Dollywood/Disney part of some great conspiracy to undermine walkability and transit in the US? No, but they sure as heck know that people feel better in that kind of human-scale environment, and they are fundamentally in the business of making people feel better via escapism.
We agree with each other. I know they were real in the pre-car era (and I have lived in some of the few remaining walkable US towns and cities), but note that my comment was speaking the present tense, not the past tense like yours.
Walkability is not the average American's lived reality today. In fact, living in a walkable area tends to be a marker of heightened privilege nowadays, sadly.
Would highly recommend a château trip down the Loire valley over Disney. ;)
And if you really need a faux fix, there's always Mini Castle Park [2] near Amboise...
[0] https://domaine-chaumont.fr/en
[1] https://www.chenonceau.com/en/
[2] https://www.parcminichateaux.com/
PS: Yes, I know Neuschwanstein, but haven't made it to Bavaria yet. On the list!
"When we visit the USA, we look at it the same way you might look at Fiji or some other underdeveloped country."
While I can explain part of that view as differences in cultural priorities (i.e. US residents valuing extensive highways over high speed rail). What I can certainly agree with is that internally in the USA, some states rate of progress far exceeds that of others to the extent that without significant leadership at the federal level there will certainly be "two Americas".
Oh I’d ride that, alright!
I'm sure Nevada wouldn't be on this list if the Las Vegas Monorail were included. Average daily ridership was 11,780 in 2022, and it can reach around 40,000 daily riders on peak conference days.
So...why do they exclude the "City of New Orleans"? They don't explain.
Also, if you're ever in Pennsylvania and go to the train museum in Strasburg you can ride that steam train as well and it is also a blast.
Oof. That's a lot of coal. ~ 1000 tons of coal/year or the CO2 equivalent of 10 million miles of driving.
Edit: corrected math
And Ireland’s anemic rail network is more a result of no investment from the 50s til the 90s than a density thing, really; there is clearly demand for far more capacity and they currently can’t build it fast enough.
The Limerick one is very, very bad, granted. The Galway one is actually now slightly slower than the bus! (Though still far more pleasant than the bus.)
AIUI nearly all rail travel volume is on the Dublin and Cork commuter lines these days; the intercity ones are kinda an afterthought (the only one to even manage hourly operation is Dublin to Cork at this point, I think).
Bikes only, with a train station to a larger city.
I think theirs a project like this in Arizona.
I say that and at the same time, I'd love it if Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga were all connected by a high speed rail line (and on down to Atlanta from there). I just don't see the will to get it done.
Even if you built train lines everywhere outside urban areas, any stop you step off at would still require a 20 minute drive to get to where you are going.
Sweden - Stockholm (5260/km2), Gothenburg (2936/km2), Malmo (4641/km2) Tennesee - Nashville (557/km2), Memphis (777/km2), Knoxville (782/km2)
Averages lie.
The density map of the US already resembles the US highway map. Many of the few pockets that don't are explainable with old passenger train maps overlaid on top of that.
Just adding passenger train-only routes on top of existing interstate highways, stopping only at existing exits, would go a long way to service a lot of the US population. It would also presumably spur more walkability efforts at a number of those exits if it was also a passenger train stop.
Also population per km^2 can be incredibly misleading, because it's an average. One example could have the population far more evenly spread across the land area, and another could have a dense urban core surrounded by farmland or national parks.
Florida has a slightly higher population than Denmark, but as an example, one of it's largest cities, Orlando, has a population density of ~283 people / km2, while Copenhagen has a population density of 6800 people / km2.
I have lived in Florida all my life. It is sadly the definition of sprawl. There is no way to build enough rail that would serve the average Floridian for day to day transport.
The overlapping network effects OP mentioned of how modern metropolises were built, combined with modern bureaucracy, make widespread passenger rail an exceedingly difficult political and economic proposal - far more difficult than it would have been 100 or even 50 years ago.
I'm sure others have mentioned this here, but look at how high-speed rail in California is faring for a good example of the political difficulty involved. The legal hurdles, environmental reports, back-and-forth bargaining between varying levels of government, the NGOs that need to be called in and paid a lot... it's not at all easy. And that's before you get to the structural mismatch between widespread rail transport and all the network effects that led to car culture.
Perhaps Tennessee can fare better due to it being a comparatively very conservative state (which currently codes as having less regulatory burden). But I'm not holding out hope.
Even in countries that don't have the structural problems the US has that lead to cars you still see personal transportation, be it vehicles or motorized bikes, thriving and the preferred means of travel.
https://www.howardweinsteinbooks.com/single-post/2017/07/05/...
You can see SF in 1906 as cars started to take the place of horse and buggy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY. The early automobiles even fit the same profile as a buggy.
From the article:
> Outside of Amtrak’s once-daily City of New Orleans, Tennessee has only three rail transit systems (two of which are currently suspended). That leaves just the WeGo Star in Nashville, which is among the lowest-ridership commuter rail lines in the country.
Naturally the regulatory and political landscape of now is quite different, and in a lot of ways for the better. But it is unfortunate that we've more or less forgotten how to do things.
It's getting downvoted because it's neither of those things. It's basically bigotry towards his outgroup ("ewww those rural hicks" drips from that comment) with a thin veneer of pretending to be concerned for minorities.
wow.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
BUT the fact that we're all still so impressed by steam engines that we decided that 1000 tons of coal a year ( 622 cars worth of co2, the annual energy use of ~250 US homes a year) was a good value just to see an antique demo at the US's 30th (!!) most popular theme park bodes pretty poorly for us and our priorities.
Might not be nostalgic, but these things have huge steam stacks and exhaust output seemingly; is capture at all possible?
This has actually occasionally been done! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric–steam_locomotive
> A few steam engines operating for historical tourism doesn't seem like a big issue for emissions compared to the millions of ICE cars. We should keep them operating on their original fuel.
The CO2 emissions aren't the only issue; they are _seriously_ dirty. Probably fine in Dollywood where it's presumably quite open, but in some countries it's somewhat common to run 'heritage' engines on main lines as an event, and it can really be _pretty bad_ in enclosed stations.
There are historic steam engines operating all over the US. I know of a few in Northern California alone. But not coal mind you, most are oil fired.
Europe has lots of train infrastructure because it was very poor after WW2, and its people could afford nothing but train fare.
America has lots of car infrastructure because it was very rich after WS2, and its people have the freedom to choose personal transportation.
Over 90% of American households have at least one car. It’s not because American government doesn’t invest in public transit. It’s because Americans, even poor Americans, overwhelmingly choose personal transportation.
But in actual US metro areas where much of the country lives, land use choices were made to enhance moving cars at the expense of other modes of transport. Urban areas were bulldozed to funnel cars into downtowns from far-flung suburbs. Amsterdam, on the other hand, was once a car-loving city, but has chosen to redevelop streets for transit and active transportation. Personal choice matters, but how much is driven by incentives?
A lot of American choice is an illusion. The national expressway network was created to serve national security purposes. Beloved trolley systems in medium density cities were unceremoniously ripped out. Car and tire companies pushed the bus-ification of public transport in order to kill any notion that it should offer comfort and reliability.
The American government refuses to invest in density because its sees sprawl as a deterrant against nuclear threat. (A threat that it takes an active role in escalating, mind you.)
>It’s because Americans, even poor Americans, overwhelmingly choose personal transportation.
If you take notice, much of the most expensive and valuable property in this country is in dense regions where it is possible to live without a car. If Americans truly had a choice, they'd pick the kinds of walkable communities they can only experience now on university campuses and in theme parks.
If there is no usable public transit then people have to use cars. But if they have cars then there isn't the will for the public transit. A vicious circle.
Public transit does need to be built somewhat on a "if you build it they will come" philosophy, which is hard when people want immediate returns on investment.
Public transit cannot compete with private transit outside of cost unless you have a very, very high population density, which makes it unpopular with people who can afford alternatives (i.e. almost all Americans).
So how do you thing roads are build? Is that not a subsidy? Especially out in rural areas where people always complain the loudest that public transport doesn't work because it requires subsidies. If you would make people pay for their road use, rural living would very quickly become unsustainable for most.
Let's not even talk about all the externalities like land cost of those roads especially in metropolitan areas.
No? In my area, new local roads are normally built by developers and maintained by HOAs, with fuel taxes covering most state and federal road work (I think it should all be covered by fuel taxes personally).
> Especially out in rural areas where people always complain the loudest that public transport doesn't work because it requires subsidies.
Public transportation makes absolutely no sense in rural areas, so I'm not sure what your point is here.
> If you would make people pay for their road use, rural living would very quickly become unsustainable for most.
People do pay for road use, via fuel taxes, so again I'm not sure what your point is here.
> Let's not even talk about all the externalities like land cost of those roads especially in metropolitan areas.
Feel free to talk about it in detail, instead of playing the usual "Oh, the externalities! Why won't anyone think of the externalities!" game I see over and over from public transit advocates.
My point is, even if roads are build and maintained by fuel taxes only (as you point out they usually are not, and in most countries much of the road network was build using other income sources), those fuel taxes are a not local (happy to be corrected though), i.e. rural roads get massive subsidies from metropolitan areas.
Often when we compare transit to automobiles we don't take into account the cost of roads (???). Interstates have cost us over 25 trillion by now. That's just the interstates.
Secondly, road costs are mostly paid for by fuel (i.e. use) taxes, and I think the fuel tax should be increased to pay for all of it personally. What percentage of public transit costs are covered by use taxes? In my area (which is a major city that is not NYC), it's around 10%, and it still makes little financial sense to take public transportation if you value your time at all or are traveling as a group (which families do regularly) and look at out of pocket costs.
Third, you (as with other transit advocates, which I will assume you are based on this comment, feel free to correct me) completely miss the point even though I explicitly stated it. Even if roads are significantly more expensive, Americans can afford it and are willing to pay for the massive increase in convenience. If that changes, then spending patterns should change as well.
And I say all this as someone who prefers living in a walkable area and lives close to a public transit and uses it when it makes sense (which is not often, despite my work also being very close to a stop on the same line I live on).
[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
Americans would suddenly be interested in small cars again, which seems like a win to me, because there's almost nothing that will make them desire public transit despite what some hope for.
I would be fine with the mileage being tracked at the annual inspection and getting a bill based on that, but it seems like I'm in the minority there.
* the US Federal Government gave returning servicemen a lot of money, including low-cost mortgages and loans, which resulted in huge housebuilding programs that created huge suburbs and exurbs (because it's much cheaper for the housebuilder): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill
* the US Gov spent billions on public works to create the highway system in the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
* huge swathes of the USA enacted zoning laws so that the only type of house that could be built was single-family homes with huge gaps between them, creating the lowest possible density neighbourhoods, effectively requiring a car to get around (whereas higher density housing could have the same number of residents and be walkable) -- there's a strong likelyhood this was done to allow white flight to neighbourhoods that keep the socioeconomically deprived out, and until the 1960s it was completely legal to say "you can't rent or sell this house to black people" (it was only made illegal in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-family_zoning
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_steering
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_(law)#Exclusionary_co...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_Uni...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_segregation_in_the...
These components very much add up to incentives to build widely and sparsely and to rely on cars to make it work. It didn't happen because Americans were rich, but because rich Americans wanted to exclude poor people from their lives
I don't know why public transit nerds can't accept that their preferences are wildly unpopular with the American public at large, why they can't understand that public transit is a substandard option for anyone who isn't a single, healthy individual of limited means in a relatively urban area (which in case it's not clear, is a tiny percentage of the US population), or why they ignore that almost every human on Earth chooses to buy a private vehicle as soon as they can afford it.
The critical ingredient wasn't wealth per se but oil. Which also determined the lines of attack and victory in the war.